Month: February 2012

“Last Words of Copernicus” in Bruce Springsteen’s “Death to My Hometown”

Update: I’ve co-written (with John Plunkett) an expanded account of Bruce Springsteen’s sampling of “Last Words of Copernicus” for the first issue of The Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter: “Bruce Springsteen’s Sacred Harp Sample.”

Bruce Springsteen’s new song “Death to My Hometown” samples Alan Lomax’s 1959 recording of “Last Words of Copernicus”—an 1869 tune from The Sacred Harp composed by Georgia-based Sacred Harp singer Sarah Lancaster. A setting of a stanza from a 1755 hymn by Philip Doddridge, Lancaster’s tune creatively re-imagines the words as having been spoken by the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

Social Intercropping and Sacred Harp Singing

I presented a paper at last weekend’s Atlanta Graduate Student Conference in U.S. History titled “Social Intercropping: Sacred Harp Singing in the Cotton-Cultivating U.S. South.” An abridged version of a recent seminar paper, my presentation demonstrated connections between the scheduling of Sacred Harp singings and the cotton farming calendar between 1845 and 1929 and examined how Sacred Harp singings adapted to the post-cotton Southern political economy after World War II.